VOICES OF THE IMMACULATE (2021)
“It can be hard to understand people when they sing. Melodies are often complex; accompaniments are dense; vocalists favor the musical line over crisp diction. Millions, after all, have thought the Beatles wrote the lyric “The girl with colitis goes by.”
Proponents of performing opera in English translation — in English-speaking countries, of course — say that intelligibility is their goal. But the results are often no clearer to the audience than German or Italian would have been.
So it was no small feat that the text in “Voices of the Immaculate” — a simmering new cantata by Kati Agocs, given a resolute premiere performance by Lucy Dhegrae at the Miller Theater at Columbia University on Thursday — was entirely, word for word, lucid. What a relief not to be reaching for the program every other sentence to find out what was being sung.
Indeed, “Voices,” scored for singer and quintet, was conceived, as Agocs said in an onstage discussion, with transparency as a first principle. Her text — an alternation of fragments from the Book of Revelation with lines from the testimony of survivors of sexual abuse by the clergy — demands to be heard, and is. In Dhegrae’s calm, purposeful delivery, there was no escaping what she and Agocs were saying in this seven-section, 30-minute piece.
Not that their story isn’t ambiguous. Revelation is quoted here not, as usual, for its apocalyptic fervor, but in a mood of utopian sweetness. Is this meant to be an ironic counterpoint to the accounts of the abused? If so, the irony is held very close to the vest, with music that feels quietly, unremittingly sincere.
Moving solemnly around the stage, Dhegrae, while not embodying a character per se, presented a beautifully underplayed childlike persona. A passage of scat turned into something eerily like baby talk, and a section of testimony with the refrain “I believe God should have been there with me” was delivered with plain, luminous simplicity.
It isn’t Sprechstimme, but the vocal line has the naturalness of speech; direct without being tuneful, it recalled at moments the mid-20th-century American art song style of a Samuel Barber. This heavy material could have been milked for mawkish portentousness; Agocs and Dhegrae realized that restraint would be more powerful.
In the accompaniment, from the quintet Third Sound (Sooyun Kim, flute; Romie de Guise-Langlois, clarinet; Karen Kim, violin; Michael Nicolas, cello; Mika Sasaki, piano), slight jittery motifs yielded to arid expanses. In one section, Sasaki switched to celesta, for a chilling melding of ominousness and guilelessness. All isn’t near-silence. A moment of aggressive winds illustrates the fires of Revelation, and the piece is filled out with spacious — if still understated — postludes after the vocal sections. But Agocs usually paints with a light brush: a faint drone in the strings, say, with a dark rumble in the piano underneath.
- THE NEW YORK TIMES, Review of world premiere by Lucy Dhegrae and Third Sound on Kati Agócs Portrait Concert at Miller Theatre (Columbia University), 10 December 2021 (Zachary Woolfe)
“Voices of the Immaculate (2021) is a seven-movement chamber cantata for mezzo-soprano and the ensemble..for texts, Agócs took fragments from the Book of Revelations and from the written testimonies of unnamed survivors of clerical sexual abuse, some from recent times, others from a half century or more ago. It was important to Agócs that the texts employed came from various regions, ethnic groups and genders…the work was written with mezzo Lucy Dhegrae in mind, and in the discussion that occurred between the performances of Immutable Dreams and Voices of the Immaculate we learned that the composer and the singer engaged in close, albeit quarantined, collaboration throughout the process.
The composition is much more sophisticated and eclectic than Immutable Dreams. The musical language remains advanced, with much chromaticism and with extended performance techniques, but Agócs’s stylistic palette included scat singing and even folklike ballad references. Great effort was employed to keep the instrumental texture light enough for complete verbal clarity, yet also to allow each of the Third Sound players to have solo moments. Among those instrumental solos, the most gripping was an intense one by cellist Michael Nicolas in the movement, “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.” The survivor texts covered such topics as guilt, the impulse to remain silent about the abuse, the loss of innocence and of faith, and the sense of personal isolation. The settings were neither overtly dramatic nor emotionally overdrawn—a wise choice on Agócs’ part, as the subdued vagueness closely mirrors what we know about the reluctance most survivors have in publicly discussing their experiences. It was noteworthy that despite the tragic nature of the topic, Agócs was able to find ways of including moments of hope, redemption and even renewal of faith.”
- OPERA NEWS, Review of Kati Agócs Portrait Concert at Miller Theatre (Columbia University), 11 January 2022 (Arlo McKinnon)